Word: birding
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Back in its beginnings, a wit had cracked: "The only thing Rockefeller Center will be used for is a bird sanctuary...
...workers, men such as Picasso and Derain, for it was Bakst who supervised the artistic endeavors of these men while they were connected with the "Ballet Russe"; and it was about this time that Stravinsky, at the request of Diaghilev, composed his "Petrouchka" and "The Fire Bird" for presentation by the company...
Starlings have long memories, sometimes tossing off the calls of summer birds in the dead of winter. Moreover, like humans, they occasionally go crazy over a popular bird tune number, most of the birds in a murmuration repeating it over & over until at last they get tired of it and discard it. Botanist Harry Ardell Allard of the U. S. Department of Agriculture has devotedly studied the mimicry of starlings, coaxing them to perform by placing nesting boxes outside his window. In Science last week he reported a prodigy. One starling, having imitated the long, low, monotonous call...
...Starlings also have a nondescript call of their own. "The greater part of it," says Ornithologist Aretas A. Saunders, "is sibilant, fricative [sounds of zh, sh, th], or harsh and rattling, but here and there the bird intersperses loud, clear, slurred whistles, most of them slurred downward. . . . The young, when gathering in their first flocks in June and committing depredations in cherry trees, make a loud grating or hissing noise...
...hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his thoughts are appropriate to the years of the Penny Farthing...